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Are you completely new to Twilight Imperium? This resource is to help you gain a grasp at what it is you're getting into when you step into your very first game. We want everyone to have a positive experience, and we firmly believe that having the right expectations can help mitigate many of the disasters that can befall a new player.

Are you tasked with teaching new players Twilight Imperium? This resource hopes to give you priorities and a general philosophy of how to approach new players. New players' experiences will, oftentimes, be determined by an effective teacher so it is important to go into their first game with some expectations of your own.

After both of these resources, we have Errata for last week's First Impressions. If you want to skip all the newer player stuff, jump to 57:40 to get our reactions to listener feedback from last week's episode.

Tell us about your first games of TI4 here or on Facebook , Twitter , or email us at [email protected]

And thanks for listening!

Can't wait to listen, I was looking forward to this ep before my first time both playing and teaching this weekend.

Nice Podcast.

I agree with taking a few races out of the choices, and we agreed on 4 of the 5 to take out. That still leaves 12 races, which in a 6 player game, still leaves plenty of choices. But I did have a question on why you chose to take out the Embers instead of the Ghosts of Creuss? I find the Ghosts to have more game confusing parts than just the addition of an early War Sun.

As for a point that I completely agree with, is that it helps (at least with my groups) for someone to keep track of turn order. To this end I print out a spreadsheet with races (all listed) and rounds, so when players pick the strategy cards I write it down and use it to help the flow. Once a player drops out, I put a checkmark next to their number, and skip them in the order. Its proven to be very useful in the groups I play with (both 3rd and 4th).

Part of our decision comes from having not played Muatt in TI4 yet. In TI3, Muatt we're tricky because they had a very poor start and it was hard for new players to get over that extra hump. Many new players would have such a disastrous early game that they were never able to recover.

As for ghosts, many new players are VERY intrigued by them, and a few movement bonuses and wormhole abilities, in our experience, has never been detrimental to a player's learning experience. If anything, it frees them up and makes them take bigger risks that they can usually still handle.

Downloaded and will be listening to the episode on the way home from work.

I was still going through a backlog of some of the earlier episodes. Nice work guys.

I was just listening to the "please don't go TI3 episode" and in the discussion of the Mercenaries I think you really forgot to mention the akward evasion mechanic on top of the hit assignement mechanic (when you can actually use the evasion). On top of that you commented the your favorite Mech was the robot one with Sustain Damage... who is in fact the only onle WITHOUT evasion.

This evasion and the upkeep cost, on top of the "planet becoming neutral" rules can of worms is why we leave them out. If they behaved like a regular unit with an extra ability however I would love to play with them. (Expansion material for sure)

You're totally right! We forgot to mention it because I forgot that mechanic even existed! Haven't played with mercs in so long that I'd sort of tuned most of the rules out of my memory. So glad to have all of these convoluted rules behind us.